On July 25, a Sunday and as customary a day off for the Wright brothers, came stunning news. In a frail, under-powered monoplane, his No. XI, the French aviator Louis Blériot had flown the English Channel. He had taken off from Les Baraques, near Calais, shortly before five in the morning, and landed in the Northfield Meadow by Dover Castle, covering a distance over water of 23 miles in just under 20 minutes.
As it happened, Hart Berg and Charles de Lambert were at Dover at the same time and not far from where Blériot landed. De Lambert, too, had been planning to fly the Channel and he and Berg had come to look over possible landing places.
A porter had awakened them at quarter to five that morning to say the wireless man at the hotel had just received a message that Blériot had left France, and as Berg wrote in a long letter to Wilbur and Orville, he and de Lambert were downstairs and on the beach inside three minutes. Only minutes after that a telephone message was received that Blériot had landed on the other side of Dover Castle.
“You have had all the details from the papers,” Berg continued in his letter. “I can only supplement the fact that I had a long talk with Blériot afterwards, in fact he used my room to wash up in, and the rest of the day wore my clothes.
He told me that he had never been so thrown about in his life, as when he got into this valley. He made two complete circles, and his machine was pointing out to sea when he came to the ground. The front chassis was wrecked, the propeller blades broken, but the wings and tail of his monoplane were intact. Blériot was not hurt.
From Washington, Katharine wrote to assure the Bishop that the brothers were not at all disturbed by Blériot’s flight. And, as widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic, the brothers joined in giving Blériot due credit for his performance, which they characterized as “remarkable.” “I know him well,” Wilbur said in an interview with the New York Times, “and he is just the kind of man to accomplish such an undertaking. He is apparently without fear, and what he sets out to do he generally accomplishes.”
Orville noted the many accidents Blériot had had with a machine over which he had so little control and expressed amazement that he had succeeded. Wilbur was asked if he and Orville would be making any attempts to win some of the prizes to be offered at the European air meets such as that at Reims. No, they would not, said Wilbur. Their time would be put to better use, though what that was he did not say.
All the same, throughout France, indeed throughout much of the world, Blériot’s flight was taken as only a prelude to the very burgeoning of French aviation that the New York Times had made so much of earlier in the year.
As if by magic, everything started to work at Fort Myer as it was meant to. On the evening of July 27, Orville took off with Lieutenant Frank Lahm as passenger on an official endurance trial and in an hour and 12 minutes flew around the field 79 times, at an altitude of 150 feet, not only passing the test but breaking a world record that Wilbur had set at Le Mans the year before. An estimated eight thousand spectators saw him take off and among them was President Taft.
On Friday, July 30, Orville flew what was the official cross-country speed trial required by the army. The course covered from Fort Myer to Alexandria, Virginia, a distance out and back of 10 miles. Records of the speed flown varied, from 42 to 45 miles per hour, but there was no question that Orville passed the test.
An especially smooth landing was made to the accompaniment of honking horns and cheering. Wilbur rushed to the plane, his face covered with a broad smile. Their contract with the War Department would be signed. The price to be paid by the department was $30,000—a figure that made headlines—but far more importantly their own country was at long last committed to their achievement.
“Orv finished the Fort Myer business in a blaze of glory,” wrote Katharine, who ten months earlier, sitting by his bedside there at the post hospital, had wondered if he might ever have strength enough to walk again.
III.
As reported in the Chicago Tribune, the eager interest shown by the French people in the progress of aviation could hardly be appreciated in America, and foremost among that summer’s scheduled aeronautic events was the Reims “congress of aviators where it is expected great things will be done.”